Why is Linda Greenhouse singling out Justice Scalia in this op-ed about the question of religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act?

The Supreme Court granted cert. in the Hobby Lobby case, in which a business seeks to avoid the requirement to provide coverage for abortifacient-type birth control on the ground that it burdens its free exercise of religion and is not justified by a compelling government interest. This claim is based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that was designed to give religious believers rights that the Supreme Court had recently determined were not guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. The case that restricted the scope of the Free Exercise Clause was Employment Division v. Smith, and the majority opinion was written by Antonin Scalia.

That is, of all the Supreme Court Justices who have resisted constitutional arguments for giving special exemptions for religion, the first name on your list should be Antonin Scalia!

But Linda Greenhouse's piece ends:

If the court grants the exemption the companies seek, its decision will most likely come packaged as an exercise in statutory interpretation. Only the old culture warrior, Antonin Scalia, can be counted on to acknowledge the deeper issues in play. But those issues will be there nonetheless, and that’s what makes these cases so compelling.

Packaged as an exercise in statutory interpretation? It is an exercise in statutory interpretation.

Without the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, there would be vanishingly little hope for an exemption. Employment Division v. Smith would almost surely determine that the federal government's law binds everyone in the same way. And you'd be able to thank Justice Scalia for his crisp, hard-core rule that lets legislators do things like that and keeps the judiciary in restraint.

Greenhouse knows all that. She refers and links to Smith, though she doesn't mention that Scalia wrote it. She knows the legal claim is based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It's as if there's some secret NYT rulebook that says: When writing about the Supreme Court, always attack Scalia.

The Greenhouse idea is to say this case is really about sex, because opposition to birth control and abortion is really about sex, and then Scalia is supposedly a "culture warrior" on sex issues. But even if you could accept that opposition to abortion and birth control is really about sex, what does Scalia care about sex? He's not a culture warrior! To say so is to distort the opinions of his that accuse other members of the Court of taking sides in the culture war. When he makes that accusation, he's promoting judicial restraint and deference to democratic decisionmaking. Sometimes that restraint manifests itself in cases where legislatures have done things like criminalize sodomy or restrict abortion, so he'd stand back and let social conservatives win. But that would not be because he's a "culture warrior." He's a committed pacifist, looking on, letting the victors in the legislative battle keep their spoils.

But the Hobby Lobby case isn't about narrowly interpreting the Constitution to let legislative majorities have their way. It's a conflict between 2 statutes, and it was absolutely not Antonin Scalia who encouraged giving religious exemptions. It was Congress, which was reacting to Scalia's rejection of constitutional exemptions. The RFRA bill was sponsored in the House by Congressman Chuck Schumer and in the Senate by Teddy Kennedy. (Each had a GOP co-sponsor). The Democrats controlled Congress, but the Republicans all voted for it too (with the sole exception of Jesse Helms).

From the NYT article in 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed RFRA into law:

President Clinton hailed the new law at the signing ceremony, saying that it held government "to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone's free exercise of religion."...

President Clinton voiced wonder today at this alliance of forces that are often at odds across religious or ideological lines. "The power of God is such that even in the legislative process miracles can happen," he said. 

This is about statutes and the politicos who produce them, not the judges who stand back and let them trip all over themselves pandering to everyone. If the Congress that passed the Affordable Care Act had wanted to exempt it from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it could have done so explicitly. It did not. Why should the Court cut back Congress's absurdly broad RFRA to help it out with what it failed to bother to do with the ACA?

Congress deserves another kick in the ass like the one the unanimous Supreme Court gave it in O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Unio do Vegetal (letting a religious group use the psychedelic drug hoasca despite the ever-so-important federal statute, the Controlled Substances Act).

"The Supreme Court announced today that it will hear arguments in a case challenging Obamacare's birth control coverage requirement on religious freedom grounds."

"Obamacare's employer mandates are at issue in the case, which involves whether corporations and religious institutions themselves enjoy the same First Amendment [sic] rights as individuals," says a Breaking News email from CNN.

Among the plaintiffs is Hobby Lobby, a nationwide chain of about 500 for-profit arts and crafts stores. David Green and his family are the owners, and say their Christian beliefs clash with parts of the law's mandates for comprehensive coverage. They say some of the drugs that would be provided prevent human embryos from being implanted in a woman's womb, which the Greens equate to abortion.

ADDED: Full CNN story here.

AND: Note that the claim is based not on the Constitution, but on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal statute. Congress can change the statute. That counts heavily in my book.

About those "got insurance?" ads from Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and ProgressNow Colorado Education.

I thought these were a spoof at first, but they're not. I didn't think about what was going on until I was listening the podcast of Rush Limbaugh's Wednesday show, and then it dawned on me, not because I looked at it the way Rush did, but something about his take made me see the light.

So here's what Rush said:

These ads are promoting this irresponsible behavior and assuring you that you'll be okay if you engage in this irresponsible behavior if you get insurance.  The ads are designed to convince young people, Millennials, to go sign up for Obamacare....

Rush focuses on this:


He says:

That ad is promoting promiscuity.  That ad is associating promiscuity with Obamacare.  Obamacare will get you your birth control pill so you can get him and you can get her.  And you can get each other between the covers. You don't have to worry about anything because Obamacare's got you covered because you got insurance....

Describing some other ads:

The implication here is that Millennials can be bought by promising them free access to all of this irresponsible behavior -- irresponsible, unserious behavior.

That all they care about, the only thing young people care about -- and maybe this is true since they can't find work. That all they care about is drinking shots, guzzling out of kegs, partying, hooking up, drinking wine at the gym, taking risks, and being irresponsible in general.  But then they're assuming that these same irresponsible, sybaritic, hedonistic worthless, irresponsible kids are nevertheless responsible enough to seek out insurance at the Obamacare exchange. 

No, that's not what I see here at all. Of course, Rush is interested in going back to the Sandra Fluke incident. But my take on this is that what's needed to make the insurance market work is for a lot young, healthy people to sign up for these plans that cover things older/sicker people use. But young, healthy people are shocked at the idea of paying over $500 a month when they have few medical expenses and they've been counting on things remaining the same for a while — the old young-people-think-they're-invincible phenomenon. The ad campaign is the result of brainstorming: What are all the bad things that might happen to a young healthy person?

Most of the ads show imminent accidents. Like this:



The message isn't: Get insurance so you can do risky things. It's: You think you're young and carefree but you really do face risks that could be expensive. The unspoken reality is: We want you in the system because you're the kind of person who's likely to pay more in than you take out. Now, the birth control part is a bit different, because that's a routine expense, but come on. Birth control pills cost something like $20 a month, and your insurance will be $500+ a month. You're not going to get back what you pay in through getting birth control pills free. That's just a cheap come-on.

Young, healthy people are the marks in this game. And maybe these ads help them feel hip and cool, not like those old fogeys who will disapprove of these ads. Well, the oldies are the ones who need your money. Please don't notice!

"Supreme Court to Decide Whether Corporations Can Pray."

Snarky headline at the Bill Moyers website on an article about the pending Supreme Court case dealing with whether religious persons who have set up their business using the corporate form can be compelled by the government to provide their employees with health insurance that covers drugs that they believe murder human beings.

The case isn't about praying. It's about money and what it means to be compelled to contribute your money to something that you sincerely believe God requires you to fight to the end. I think it's close to the same problem that individuals face when they pay their taxes and believe that something the government is using the money for is deeply wrong. For example: war.

But the Bill Moyers operation thinks mocking religious people is a good move. I say it's prime jackassery... except to the extent that it's old-school, left-wing hatred of corporations. Let's see how they feel if Hobby Lobby loses its case — as I think it will — and its owners dissolve the entire operation to maintain religious purity — would they? — and throw 13,000 employees out of work. I suspect the the Bill Moyers folk would double down on their contempt for religion.

The article is written by Joshua Holland, not Moyers himself, but it is tweeted under Moyers' name. Moyers, the man, is 79, so I wonder if it's really him tweeting or whether it's some soulless incorporated entity doing business under the name Moyers & Company. Isn't it nice to say "company" instead of "corporation"? It's like back in the 1950s when your mother said "company's coming over" when family or friends were joining you for dinner.

So here's Joshua Holland, who's identified not as a legal expert, but as "a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com," and he's mostly just doing extracts from the amicus brief of the Constitutional Accountability Center.

The brief notes that the religious owners of the corporations have no obligation to do anything that contradicts their personal beliefs. The law applies to the corporations, which the law views as separate “persons” — corporations are themselves entities, and they can’t actually kneel down and pray.

But religious persons do business using the corporate form. Do you want to say that they must thereafter choose between doing business in that form or following their religion? If you were doing something you sincerely believed God would send you to hell for doing, do you think that by setting up a corporation to conduct that activity, God would not count it against you? The fact that "corporations are themselves entities" doesn't solve the problem! Let's say that you wanted to kill someone, and instead of doing it yourself, you paid another person to do the killing. The fact that the other person is himself an entity for legal purposes does nothing to cut off the guilt. That is easy to see.

Holland writes, quoting the amicus brief:

Here’s a key point: nobody has to form a corporation in order to do business. They do so because it brings real benefits under the law.

True, but so what? What is the general principle here? To take advantage of a legal form is to abandon your rights? On that theory, the government can censor the New York Times (and BillMoyers.com).

I don't mean to say that I think Hobby Lobby should win this case. I just feel compelled to point out what the Moyers company is smugly ignoring: Corporations are important and necessary tools for human activities conducted on a large scale; people care about their morality and their religion even as they conduct the activities by which they earn their living; and there are deep religious convictions at stake as the government binds us together in the immense undertaking of providing for everyone's medical treatments.

I can see I'm just saying, come on, Bill, at least show some respect for the values you mean to crush. I do see the absurdity.

"Genepeeks... digitally combines the DNA of a client and a sperm donor to gauge the odds that a future baby would have various genetic disorders."

"Donors whose 'virtual children' consistently have a higher risk of inherited disorders will be removed so the prospective mother is left with the best matches — at least from a genetics standpoint."

What is wrong with that, as long as the service doesn't claim to be able to do anything more than it can do, which is, apparently, reducing some of the risk of heritable defects?

The usual bio-ethicists and other quasi-philosophers and busybodies weigh in and say things like: "It amounts to shopping for designer donors in an effort to produce designer babies... We believe the patent office made a serious mistake in allowing a patent that includes drop-down menus for which to choose a future child's traits. A project like this would also be ethically and socially treacherous."

They say things like that even though they would not say that female reproductive choice is generally an ethically and socially treacherous project. If women have the freedom and power to reject any partners they don't want and to use birth control and abortion to avert any pregnancy that doesn't align with their personal conception of what is worth doing, then we have an amazing new world, we've yet to perceive what it will be like over time, and we have no way to go back if the results of this "project" turn out badly.

Not all of us have committed to female reproductive autonomy, but it is, for the most part, the law and the dominant culture here in the United States. What is the basis for depriving women of these technological tools?

If women were truly free to select the genetic material to which to devote their reproductive efforts, we might end up, after a few generations, with a population of gangly giants, as all the ladies choose "tall" and "thin" on their drop-down menus. I do worry about that sometimes. 

"The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently."

Said Pope Francis.

The new pope’s words are likely to have repercussions in a church whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United States, often appeared to make combating abortion, gay marriage and contraception their top public policy priorities. These teachings are “clear” to him as “a son of the church,” he said, but they have to be taught in a larger context. “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives."...

In contrast to Benedict, who sometimes envisioned a smaller but purer church — a “faithful fragment” — Francis envisions the church as a big tent.

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people,” he said. “We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

Interesting to picture the smallness as protecting not purity but mediocrity.

We also learn that the Pope's favorite movie is “La Strada.”

Something In The Water (Does Not Compute).

That's a Prince song title.

It came to mind today in the context of the Chinese blogger, confessing his computer sins on government TV, including a blog post that wondered whether there were contraceptives in the water.

Meanwhile, in America, First Lady Michelle Obama has a new health campaign with the message "When you drink water, you Drink Up," encouraging people to drink "even just one more glass a day," even though there is no medical reason for pushing people to drink more water. (Drinking too much water could kill you, and normally, drinking in response to whatever thirst you have is all you're supposed to do, though the advice to drink water instead of other things is good for those who want to lose weight.)

And who can forget that the 2012 presidential campaign was — at least some of the time — seemingly all about getting free birth control coverage into Obamacare.

Must be something in the water they drink/It's been the same with every girl I've had/Must be something in the water they drink/Cuz why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad?

If I were a blogger in China, this post would be a crime, but only if it were deemed a rumor and it was also viewed more than 5,000 or reposted more than 500 times. I could get a 3-year prison sentence, not because of what I wrote, but because of what other people did with it after I wrote it — reading it, retweeting it, and construing it.

One must take care either: 1. not to become too popular or viral, or 2. to write in a manner that deters the construction that this is a rumor.

I'll do anything 4 U, anything/Why don't U talk 2 me?/Tell me who U are/Don't do this 2 me....

"Chinese state television on Sunday broadcast a startling video of a famous blogger in handcuffs, renouncing his Web posts..."

"... and saying how dangerous the Internet would be if left uncontrolled by the government."

“At first, I was careful and I didn’t write many posts,” [said Charles Xue — a Chinese American businessman and one of China’s most popular bloggers]. “But later, I posted more than 80 every day. . . . In the beginning, I verified every post. But later on, I no longer did that. All of a sudden you draw so much attention...How do you describe the feeling? Gorgeous.”...

In one [blog post], he wondered whether China’s water, whose quality is always in question, contained contraceptives.

“First of all, I didn’t double-check my facts,” Xue said. “Secondly, I didn’t raise constructive suggestions to solve the problem. Instead, I just simply spread these ideas emotionally.”...

[Under China's new laws, t]hose whose posts are deemed rumors and that have been viewed by more than 5,000 Internet users or reposted more than 500 times will be subject to prosecution and face a possible three-year prison sentence.

Xue praised the new laws Sunday. “It is very necessary to release these laws and regulations today,” he said in the video. “Without regulation, there’s no punishment for spreading the rumors.”...

Xue said that as his online following grew, so did his ego. He received invitations from universities and entrepreneurs. He felt like the “emperor of the Internet.” But, he said, in what may have been his biggest mistake, he felt that even leaders of China’s ruling Communist Party were not as powerful as he was. It’s not right for [popular bloggers] to behave higher than the law,” he said in a chastened tone. “If there is no moral standard or cost for slander, you can’t manage the Internet. And there are no limits. It becomes a big problem.”

This is important not only because of the suppression of free speech in China, but because of the light it sheds on our own ideas about controlling free speech. Xue is apparently under pressure, so anyone with any sense knows not to take these statements at face value but to read between the lines.

And yet taken literally, these statements sound like things many Americans say with sincerity, even though they are under no pressure at all and live in a culture with a tradition of free speech.

Notice the idea that writing on the internet is an addiction, a mental problem that ought to be disparaged. The blogger is an egotist, who pours out verbiage to further inflate his own grandiosity. This isn't normal speech, but bad speech, and there's so much of it that what once might have been thought of as a "marketplace of ideas" is flooded with so much tainted merchandise that the government acts wisely to step in with consumer protection measures.

Pay attention to the arguments Americans make that lend themselves to the retort: You sound like Charles Xue on Chinese state television.

"Researchers long viewed infanticide and similar acts of maternal skulduggery as pathological, a result of the mother's being under extreme stress..."

".... it made little genetic sense for a mother to destroy her young, and maternal nurturing was assumed to be a hard-wired affair. More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that 'bad' mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan... [P]andas, for example, often practice  'a postnatal form of family planning, giving birth to what may be thought of as an heir and a spare, and then, when the heir fares well, walking away from the spare with nary a fare-thee-well.'"

From a CSM article titled "Baby elephant cries for 5 hours. Is Mom rejection unusual?"

"Why are Feminists Judging Miley Cyrus?"

Asks Rush Limbaugh.

I thought we didn't have the right to judge somebody else's morality, and I thought we didn't have a right to comment.... Why does this upset these "progressive" women?...

Feminists.  Women who proudly think of themselves as independent, don't need a man for any reason whatsoever, don't need a relationship for any reason whatsoever -- a sperm bank is all you need and a dog -- are the ones who are upset about it.  (Not a cat.  It's gotta be a dog.)  Miley Cyrus, do I think she's being...? (interruption) Oh, do the upset feminazis think she's being subservient to men by doing this?  It's [an] interesting question....

Because they're the ones who told us, "Little girls are gonna have sex. You can't stop it. So introduce them to Planned Parenthood, introduce them to condoms, introduce them to cigarettes afterwards on the nightstand, introduce 'em to rooms in your house instead of the backseat of the car."  Yeah.  Why are they upset about it?  It's an interesting question.

Speaking of questions... what's this Not a cat/It's gotta be a dog?

But back to the main question: Obviously, our culture is deeply confused about young people and sexuality. It's not just feminists.

UPDATE: Miley toys with the confusion.

Female politicians "have resorted to flexing their womb-manhood."

Writes Kathleen Parker, riffing on Sarah Palin's statement that "goes something like this: 'I’m more fertile than you are.'"

(If you scroll down you'll get to the actual quote: "I say this as someone who’s kind of fertile herself." Palin was reacting to Jeb Bush's recent awkward reference to the fertility of immigrants. Parker seems to like to rewrite quotes: What Jeb said "sounds an awful lot like, 'Hotahmighty, those people can’t tie their shoes without getting pregnant.'")

It wasn't just Sarah Palin who flexed her womb-manhood to make a political argument. Parker also points to Nancy Pelosi:

When challenged about the difference between late-term abortion and the killing of babies who survived late-term abortions at the hands of the convicted murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell, Pelosi hid behind the skirt of her own bassinet.

Rather than answer the question, she invoked her five children and declared any discussion of abortion “sacred ground” to her Catholic sensibilities. Fecundity, apparently, triumphs over moral reasoning.

Parker acts as if Pelosi were claiming authority solely by virtue of her motherhood and declined to engage in "moral reasoning," but Pelosi was saying I believe in Catholic doctrine. She didn't just say she had 5 children. She said "my oldest child is six years old the day I brought my fifth child home from the hospital." That's offered as proof that she believes the doctrine — including the proscription against birth control. In my book, that translates into a statement of morality. Maybe some people don't think that's "moral reasoning," because it's the acceptance of religious doctrine (and not individual philosophizing). But clearly Pelosi was saying: I have very deep beliefs about morality here and my life as I've lived it vouches for the sincerity of these beliefs.

Parker's next sentence is:

Most likely, Pelosi is deeply troubled by what her politics requires and what her Catholic mother-heart tells her is true. 

Catholic mother-heart? Pelosi claimed she is a believing Catholic. Beliefs exist in the brain as well as in the emotions. You can call the emotions "heart," but it's still not just something her heart is telling her. It's religious doctrine that she knows and purports to accept. Now, of course, it's very easy to say that Pelosi cannot square her support for abortion rights with her Catholic beliefs. And Pelosi deserves that hit because she did have a how-dare-you shaming tone in her voice and she refused give an elaborate response to the questioner who wanted to hound her about Gosnell.

But I know what the answer is. It's that when the question is about enduring a pregnancy, the beliefs of the woman within whom that pregnancy exists are what matters. The true moral answer is that you should never have an abortion — that's the Catholic's religious belief — but the legal answer is that every woman has freedom of belief and her own beliefs control what she does with her body.

I think this is like what Jesus said about divorce:

The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?”

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?”

He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”

I know that Moses didn't say it, but one might say abortion is permitted because of the hardness of your hearts.

With 2 references to hearts — Parker's "Catholic mother-heart" and Jesus's "the hardness of your hearts" — I am reminded again of the Supreme Court's notion of what it called "the heart of liberty": "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." That's the basis of the right to have an abortion: the individual's freedom of belief.

But where was Kathleen Parker going with this column? Two highly partisan women used their own personal fertility to leverage a political argument. Noted. The 2 women are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but they were arguing about different issues: immigration and abortion. Now, we know Palin is pro-life, and Parker declares Palin's position "more palatable," but she proceeds to knock her for "her coquettish reminders that her field is still tillable," which, Parker says, "diminishes her credibility as anything other than a one-liner comedienne." I take it that's Parker's way of stating the conclusion that women ought to refrain from flexing their womb-manhood.

I think it's fine to include one's own personal experience as part of a political argument. It's a problem if you do it badly. (You don't want your audience to perceive you as coquettish!) And it shouldn't be your only argument. (You don't want to seem to be saying I have more children then you, so shut up.) But talking about real-world experience gives depth, color, and credibility to a politician's speech. As with any political speech, you need to do it well.

How not to show respect for the stay-at-home spouse.

On "Meet the Press" today, David Gregory questioned various commentators about a report from the Pew Research Center that said that in 2011 women were the sole or primary breadwinners in 40.4% of American families. (It was 10.8% in 1960.) There were some strange statements from "Republican strategist" Ana Navarro:

There has been an evolution in the American family.  You know-- and I think what we have to be as a society is accepting of what couples decide to do for themselves.  There are some people who want to lean in, there are some people who want to lean back and be on a rocking chair drinking a mint julep.  Whatever works for every couple is what we should respect…

So right off, Navarro is portraying the home-based partner as lazy! The old image was lying on the sofa eating bonbons. She's got the sofa replaced by a rocking chair and an alcoholic beverage in place of the box of chocolates. Gregory breaks in with a wisecrack — "Enough about your Sunday afternoon" — and this prompts Navarro — the Republican — to double down on her idea that the stay-at-home spouse is a sponge:

When I say in my house that I want to be a kept woman, the answer I get back is well, I want to be a kept man.  So, you know, that’s not working-- it’s not working in my house.  

Kept woman! This isn't as bad as Rush Limbaugh's notorious equation of free birth control and prostitution. It's actually kind of worse. Limbaugh intended to malign the demand for free birth control. He meant to say that the general public shouldn't have to pay for a particular person's sexual activities. He found a notoriously crude way to say I don't want to pay for you to have sex (i.e., if someone pays you to have sex, you're a prostitute). But aside from the crudeness, the opinion that the group shouldn't pay for the individual to have sex isn't offensive. It's just economics and ideology.

Navarro claimed "Whatever works for every couple is what we should respect," but she said — twice, quite clearly — that the stay-at-home partner isn't contributing. The first image was of someone loafing and drinking alcohol during the day. The second image was of a "kept woman" — that is, a woman who doesn't take care of the house and the children or do anything helpful other than to provide sex! If that "works for" you, that that's something that deserves respect — she asserts — but it wouldn't work at her house, and if she were to suggest that for herself, her husband would say that's what he wants. Obviously, the idea is that the nonbreadwinner spouse is goofing off. So where's the respect? At most, she says, if some other couple finds that this "works," then we should accept that they make their own decisions. Navarro goes on to say:

But I think, you know-- I think, we-- women that work need to be not judgmental of women who don’t.  

But your judgment leaked out all over the place!

I think men who are mister moms need to be accepted by those who are the alpha male breadwinners.  So, I think it’s got to be whatever works-- different folks…

Mr. Mom... alpha male... the disrespect is plain, even as you keep insisting you are tolerant.

Headline misread.

I've been reading too many articles about making the morning after pill available to females of all ages. I saw — under the NYT category "Room for Debate" — "At What Age Should Sex Education Begin?" and thought the debate was: "At What Age Should Sex Begin?"

"Judge rips Obama’s right-wing Plan B stance."

The headline at Salon. Text excerpts:

“It turns out that the same policies that President Bush followed were followed by President Obama,” said District Court Judge Edward Korman on Tuesday morning, in a charged and dramatic two-hour hearing in which the Obama administration defended its arbitrary policy to limit contraceptive access....

This morning, Korman repeatedly slammed his hand down on the table for emphasis, interrupting the government counsel’s every other sentence with assertions like, “You’re just playing games here,” “You’re making an intellectually dishonest argument,” “You’re basically lying,” “This whole thing is a charade,” “I’m entitled to say this is a lot of nonsense, am I not?” and “Contrary to the baloney you were giving me …” He also accused the administration of hypocrisy for opposing voter ID laws but being engaged in the “suppression of the rights of women” with the ID requirement for the drug....

“The irony is that I would be allowing what the FDA wanted. This has got to be one of the most unusual administrative law cases I have ever seen,” Korman said, adding, “I would have thought that on the day I handed down my decision, they would be drinking champagne at the FDA.”

"If a child waits too long to take the pill... a fertilized egg could reach the uterine wall and become implanted, after which the drug is useless."

"You see how the word 'child' keeps getting in the way."

There’s no point debating whether such young girls should be sexually active. Obviously, given the potential consequences, both physical and psychological, the answer is no. 

Potential consequences?

It seems to me that when you're talking about girls under the age of 15, if there is an occasion to buy a morning-after pill, there is an occasion to report a serious crime.

"Is It Time for Off-the-Shelf Birth-Control Pills?"

A NYT "news analysis" written by its environment and health reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal plays off the news that "a federal judge recently ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make the morning-after pill available to women of all ages without a prescription." We're told that was "a political embarrassment for the Obama administration."

Was it a political embarrassment? I thought it was exactly what is helpful to the Obama administration. Instead of being responsible for cheapening contraception and perhaps risking women's health in the process, Obama et al. can say the judge made it happen. It's great political cover.

But that controversy may look like a tempest in a teapot compared with a broader and no less heated discussion that is roiling the medical community: should birth-control pills of any type require a doctor’s prescription? Or should they be available, like Tylenol, on pharmacy shelves?

Last December the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an official position paper concluding that the time had come for birth-control pills to be sold over the counter. It was the first time the group had endorsed such sales, concluding that scientific evidence suggested that the practice was safe and calling it “a potential way to improve contraceptive access and use, and possibly decrease the unintended pregnancy rate.”

After having won reelection by demagoguing contraception, Obama is mired in the horrible — how horrible? — problem of implementing the Affordable Care Act, with its promise of contraception coverage. What would be more helpful than birth control pills sold over the counter like Tylenol? Oh, it's safe enough say the obstetricians and gynecologists. What are their economic interests here? Do they want a big new stream of patients coming in for simple prescriptions? Perhaps they fear the piddling reimbursements they'll get for this work. If only the federal courts would take the heat for the decision to block access to doctors for routine birth control care. The federal courts could make it seem like it's about — yay! — Women's Rights and not — boo! — cost cutting.

But the NYT analysis is not about the economics of Obamacare and things that might disturb liberals. It's about the Warriors on Women, the religionists and pro-lifers. They've been questioning the safety of the morning-after pill, which, unlike regular birth control pills, entails the abortion issue. Making righties seems like the opponents of over-the-counter birth control pills is a great distraction from the cost-cutting in the implementation of Obamacare. If righties are the opponents, opposition — to lefties — is toxic.

That legal dispute [over morning after pills] has highlighted the Obama administration’s hair splitting over the sensitive issue of contraceptive policy. Even though F.D.A. doctors said in 2011 that studies showed that it was safe to sell Plan B, the most common emergency contraceptive, to adolescents over the counter, the administration refused to approve the practice. (It was already available to older women.) That set the stage for the ruling earlier this month by Judge Edward R. Korman of the Eastern District of New York, who called the administration’s action “politically motivated and scientifically unjustified” — essentially an attempt to appease religious conservatives.

Surely, the Obama people are privately thanking Judge Korman. Opposition to the need to go to the doctor for birth control is religious conservatism. The judge says it's women's rights!

Politics aside, there are procedural hurdles to clear before packs of birth-control pills can be sold without prescription. First of all, a drug maker would most likely have to apply to the F.D.A. to make the switch....

Most likely. Unless the judges step up.

"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

"Judge Orders Morning-After Pill Available for All Ages."

Federal District Judge Edward R. Kormancalled the Obama administration’s restrictions “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.”

“The F.D.A. has engaged in intolerable delays in processing the petition. Indeed, it could accurately be described as an administrative agency filibuster.”...

Scientists, including those at the F.D.A., have been recommending unrestricted access for years, as have major medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2011, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, issued a statement saying that after rigorous study the agency concluded it was safe to sell Plan B One-Step over the counter. But she was overruled by Ms. Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, the first time such a public countermanding had ever occurred.

Am I wrong to assume that Obama and Sebelius are secretly pleased to have the court impose this for them?

Why Buddhism? Why truth? Why children?

I challenge Bob Wright about the way Westerners indulge in Buddhism and a few other things:

Purchase of the day.

Yesterday, February 8. "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster" [Kindle Edition] Jonathan V. Last (Author) (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.90)

P.J. O’Rourke quipped of this book: "A powerful argument that the only thing worse than having children is not having them. I'm reading What To Expect When No One's Expecting aloud to the three little arguments for birth control at my house in hope they'll quit squabbling and making messes and start acting so cute that all my neighbors decide to conceive."

Thank you to all who used the Althouse portal yesterday to make a total of 60 purchases and caused the blogger to think, they like me... they really like me!